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We now know how and why Roger Penske is the successful racing entrepreneur, businessman and go-to guy for just about everything else in the United States of America today: he works hard and has a plan.

He sets goals and expects his employees (including the racing drivers) to meet them. If they don’t, he replaces them.

His motto is: “Effort equals success.” He leads the way, with 17- and 18-hour days, seven days a week. He might go sailing on a magnificent yacht he owns for a few weeks in January (hence his nickname: The Captain), but otherwise, he’s on the job, whether that’s running Penske Corp., the Penske Motor Group, Penske Truck Leasing, Penske Logistics, rebuilding the city of Detroit (seriously) or working with Team Penske, which we are most interested in today.

This season marks the 50th year of Penske Racing, which has successfully competed in Indy car racing, NASCAR, international sports car racing and Formula One. Penske himself was a champion racing driver in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He had the opportunity in 1965 to purchase a Chevrolet dealership in Philadelphia, but General Motors told him it didn’t want one of its dealer principals driving racing cars and said to choose one or the other.

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Penske — as did Indy 500 winner Jim Rathmann, who opened a Cadillac dealership in Melbourne, Fla., about the same time — chose business, but in order to remain actively involved in racing, he launched Team Penske (Mark Donohue, driver) in 1966. They had a podium finish in that year’s 24 Hours of Daytona, and the rest — as they say — is history.

And this is where the goals come in.

On July 2, at Daytona International Speedway, driver Brad Keselowski won the 100th NASCAR race for the Penske organization, and that got the boss excited.

“The 100th in NASCAR is something special,” Penske told reporters. “It’s a byproduct of all the good people we have, and to me, we’ve got to continue to remember that. We’ve competed in multiple series, and I think we’re almost at 450 wins now (in total), and we’re, I think, three or four away from 500 poles. (IndyCar driver Simon Pagenaud won that 500th pole for Penske at Iowa Speedway last Sunday.) Our goal is 500 and 500. This was the first step: to get to 100 in NASCAR.”

So, there you have it. The first step to get to 500 wins was 100 in NASCAR. And when Penske and his people reach that 500 and 500 target, you can bet they’ll sit down and start to figure out how they’ll make it to 1,000 and 1,000. It’s a pity that more governments and businesses can’t be run as efficiently and effectively.

I mentioned that Penske works 18-hour days, seven days a week. And when he wants things done, he wants them done now, not later. Here’s an example.

In 1991, Paul Tracy’s father, Tony, bought his son a seat in one of Dale Coyne’s Indy cars for the Grand Prix of Long Beach. Paul qualified the car seventh on the grid, and that got Penske’s attention. Although not a bucket of bolts, the Coyne car was not in the same class as most of the CART cars and teams of the day, and to do what Tracy did required exceptional talent and nerve.

Several weeks later, Tony and Paul were invited to a meeting with Penske at his corporate offices in downtown Detroit (since relocated to Bloomfield Hills, Mich., a Detroit suburb). The time of the meeting: 11 p.m. on a Friday night. Time the invitation was issued to Tony in Toronto: 4 p.m., the same day.

“I tracked down Paul, and we drove to Detroit and found the building,” Tony told me in conversation years ago. “We were ushered into an oak-panelled boardroom that was dominated by a table big enough for a couple of dozen people. They sat us at one end of that table. At 11 p.m. sharp, a door opened and Penske walked in, dressed in a white shirt and tie and looking as fresh as if it was seven in the morning. He sat down at the other end of the table and had an assistant bring a single piece of paper down to us.

“It was a contract offer. Paul was to test for Team Penske and maybe get some races, but there wasn’t a guarantee of that. It was for four years — $25,000 the first year, $50,000 the second, 75 the third and $100,000 the fourth. That was it. I said thank you and that we’d have our lawyer look at it and get back to him.

“Roger shook his head. ‘Sign it now, or the offer is withdrawn,’ he said. ‘I can pick up the phone right now and call a dozen drivers who would sign on the spot.’

“So we signed.”

Paul Tracy began his career with Team Penske that summer (he eventually won 12 of those 400-plus races for The Captain) and got his first start that fall at Michigan International Speedway. In the early laps, Tracy had the first of his many crashes in the big leagues and broke his right leg. Penske’s reaction?

“He’d better heal quickly. He’s got work to do.”

Going into this weekend’s Honda Indy Toronto, three of Team Penske’s four drivers occupy three of the top five places in the Verizon IndyCar Series standings. Simon Pagenaud is in the lead, with Will Power third and Helio Castroneves fifth. The fourth driver, Juan Pablo Montoya, is 11th

In NASCAR, Keselowski is second in the standings after the Sprint Cup race in Kentucky, and his teammate, Joey Logano, is fifth.

Both NASCAR drivers are tigers. Keselowski talked himself into a Penske ride by guaranteeing wins and championships. Penske was impressed and essentially gave Keselowski a chance to show what he could do. He delivered, big-time, winning what is now the Xfinity Series title in 2010 (it was Penske’s first NASCAR championship) and the Sprint Cup in 2012.

There have been a few lean(er) years since, but Penske’s insistence on excellence — particularly on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the race team — no doubt has had an influence on the improvement in the stock car’s team’s performance.

There have been disappointments, to date, in that a Penske car didn’t win the Indianapolis 500 this year, or the Daytona 500 or the Coca-Cola 600 or the Coke Zero 400 either. There’s still the Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis but it doesn’t carry the weight of the first three. Which leaves championships, and you can make book today that the goals for 2016 have shifted — and if Team Penske can’t win the big races, the two big championships will just have to do.

Here is an example of Penske’s influence and control.

In 1990, for one reason or another, Penske didn’t arrive in Toronto for the CART-sanctioned Indy race until Saturday morning. A dominant team, as always, Penske’s drivers that season — Rick Mears, Danny Sullivan and Emerson Fittipaldi — had been “out to lunch” in practice sessions on Friday, setting speeds that would have left them well back in the field if qualifying or the race had been held that day.

By the time the third practice started Saturday morning, about a hour after The Captain arrived, things started to improve, and when qualifying finished that Saturday afternoon, Sullivan was on pole, Mears was sixth and Emmo was seventh.

A coincidence? Perhaps. But Roger Penske was in the house, and his employees knew they had to raise their game to match his. It’s how he does business.

Roger Penske, the race-car driver, had success in Canada. In 1959 (he’d started racing in 1958 at a speedway in Ohio), he won the Sundown Grand Prix at Harewood Acres (near Jarvis), co-driving with Canadian Harry Entwistle. He repeated as Sundown champion in 1960, partnering that time with Canadian Peter Ryan. Tragically, both Entwistle and Ryan were both to lose their lives racing, not long after enjoying success with Penske.

Mosport Park opened in 1961, and Penske entered some of the major races there (the Canadian Grand Prix for sports cars, for instance) but didn’t win. But he was almost unbeatable elsewhere, particularly while driving in the U.S. Auto Club’s road racing series, and in 1962 was named Driver of the Year by Sports Illustrated.

He drove in Formula One races and NASCAR. He won a Grand National race in the latter (it was the top NASCAR series at the time) but never won in F1 while behind the wheel (John Watson won a Grand Prix in a Team Penske car, however). And then there was the opportunity to go Indy car racing in 1963 with chief mechanic Clint Brawner, assistant Jim McGee and owner Al Dean in the famous and legendary Dean Van Lines Special after they fired Eddie Sachs.

Penske says today that the reason he didn’t do the test was because he was employed as a sales engineer for Alcoa Aluminum (he’d graduated from Lehigh University with a degree in industrial management) and couldn’t get the time off it would have taken. Chances are, however, that he knew his odds of remaining alive at the time were significantly better in just about any other form of racing than Indy cars.

Brawner, et al, settled on another driver, by the way. His name? Mario Andretti. He did pretty well, too.

“At the end of the day, we went in different directions,” Penske told SiriusXM’s Doron Levin in an interview for the Saturday noon program In the Driver’s Seat (Insight channel 121). “(But) racing has proved to be a common thread in all our businesses. It’s given us a competitive advantage, you might say.”

On the same program, he explained why he stays racing:

“You have to have to the ability to take the losses with the wins,” he said. “In racing, you probably lose more than you win, and you have to figure out how to manage through the lows. (But) racers are tough,” he said. “There are people in the racing business and then there are racers. If you’re a racer, you never put the pencil down. The enjoyment is competing hand-to-hand with your competitors and coming out on top. It helps us to build our brand and it keeps us motivated.”

Penske, Detroit Red Wings/Detroit Tigers owner Mike Ilitch and Dan Gilbert (Quicken Loans) have — it seems — teamed up to rescue the city of Detroit. This story is about Penske but the other two have been by his side when things like donations of police cars and ambulances have been made to the city and a revitalized downtown entertainment district project launched where Ilitch has built a new arena for the hockey team and Penske was the driver (and financial contributor) behind a light-rail transit system.

A hit of the 2006 Super Bowl telecast was an automobile commercial featuring a downtown Detroit landmark, the Book Cadillac Hotel. It showed a doorman and glittering lights and exuded glamour. The message? Detroit was back.

Roger Penske did that. After Detroit was awarded Super Bowl XL, Penske was selected by Bill Ford Jr. of that car company to spiff up the city — including that hotel — in time for the game and telecast. Downtown Detroit was not in good shape, once you got past the waterfront Cobo Center, Joe Louis Arena and the GM world headquarters at the Renaissance Center.

If you have a big job, the saying goes, you give it to a busy person. Penske assembled and headed up a team of about 40 people to handle the Super Bowl project and didn’t miss a moment of his day job. Everything continued to thrive, and many people have since credited Penske’s leadership for the city turning a corner.

Said Ford, who was quoted by the Detroit News: “Penske is the most impressive businessman in the city. Everything he touches works because of his personal drive and because his attention to detail is so exquisite. I just love being around the guy.”

And the News also quoted his second wife, Kathryn, who is the mother of three of his five children: “Roger and I didn’t grow up here, but this is our home now, and we both want to help Detroit succeed. I can tell you, he doesn’t like to lose.”

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